


watching waiting commiserating

by mletart



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, the 'Noah recounts some of Pynch's greatest hits' fic exactly one (1) person asked for, this is like mOSTLY canon compliant ?, with more feels than the summary and tags probably lead you to believe?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 07:29:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15480684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mletart/pseuds/mletart
Summary: Pynch Week 2018: Day 8 - Free ChoiceIn which Noah reminisces on Ronan and Adam's relationship.





	watching waiting commiserating

**Author's Note:**

> Title is dedicated to Noah's Blink-182 loving self.
> 
> I really didn't know what to do for the other pynch week prompts, so I asked my friend who loves Noah most of all for some help with ideas, and shockingly enough, my friend who loves Noah most of all told me to write about Noah. So I gave it a shot?
> 
> Also I give a brief shout out to Cole St. Clair from Stiefvater's Wolves of Mercy Falls series. For anyone unfamiliar, the quick version is he's the lead singer of a band called NARKOTIKA who struggles with drug addiction who disappears from the public eye when he goes werewolf~ Later he gets like his own reality show stint and it's very entertaining. I don't have any idea what the timelines are like for a sort of crossover to make sense but I just sort of rolled with it quick? idk it felt right
> 
> Anyway I hope you like this!

Spirits who didn’t follow the path to the other side were left to drift. They meandered. They lost themselves the more distance there was between them and everything that mattered when they were living.

Noah thought he was probably the most lost, but he’d never gotten to a place where the living world didn’t matter. Most days holding on to the fact that it mattered was the only thing he had.

What remained of Aurora Lynch was far less than the farthest drifting, longest lingering spirit Noah had ever encountered. Part of him thought this was likely because she wasn’t a natural being, but he felt bad about the thought, for Ronan’s sake. For Ronan’s sake, he couldn’t let what was left of Aurora Lynch be lost. 

So he bolstered her as much as he could, with stories, with memories. It made him feel more grounded, too, the reminiscing, rewalking the well-worn moments of time that he favored the most.

Aurora wanted to know everything he could tell her about her son, but the stories she favored most were when Ronan was with Adam. Noah - in a haphazard energized train of thought that carried remnants of the he-who-he-was-before, the far-off-him of an almost imaginary lifetime - felt a little like a highly concentrated scholar who had finally found a real-world application for his specified knowledge. He’d quietly watched Ronan and Adam progress, duly noting their changing dynamics along with Blue and Gansey’s, speculating on what it meant, in turns immensely concerned and immensely happy for them, careful not to voice his thoughts, worried any outside interference may be damaging. 

Noah didn’t mind telling Aurora that Ronan and Adam’s relationship started off rough. Aurora hardly seemed surprised, and she and Noah were both of the opinion that many of the best relationships originated from light animosity. Though that was easy to say in hindsight. At first, Ronan wore his jealousy like acid-tipped barbs and Adam refused to be intimidated, operating at absolute zero with a steady disapproving gaze so distant that to give a proper account of it you’d have to measure in light-years. Gansey and Noah exchanged a lot of nervous looks.

Gansey had wanted nothing more than for all of his friends to get along, and while Noah’s instincts tended toward letting things be, Gansey had been intent on getting to the bottom of things. Or at least, he’d surely tried. “What’s so wrong with Adam?” Gansey would ask, tired and clearly frustrated.

“Who said there has to be anything wrong with him,” Ronan muttered darkly at one point, deliberately focusing his attention on his beer bottle and not on Gansey. “We’re good, just us.” He said, gesturing to encompass himself, Gansey, and Noah. “We’re fine. I never asked for Parrish, I never wanted him around, and now you’re always trying to bring him everywhere, and I’m fucking sick of seeing his stupid fucking face.”

Gansey had sighed, annoyed with Ronan for his attitude and distressed with his own inability to affect some positive change in the situation, and turned away. But it got Noah thinking. He knew it was just part of who Ronan was, that Ronan cared for his friends in a large all-encompassing way, and for him, that meant being obnoxiously territorial about them. Noah wasn't surprised Ronan would behave like an ass; Ronan wouldn’t like anyone who dared to try to enter their group, not at first. But now, listening to Ronan, Noah started to think that it wasn’t just that Ronan hated the general idea of someone trying to befriend his friends. Ronan was having a hard time dealing with Adam, specifically. Personally. And Noah could read the signs as to why.

Over time, though they still bickered just about constantly, there was a sort of shift, in which it felt less like they bickered because they were chafing at being forced to spend time together, and a little more like they bickered as a way of entertaining themselves while they hung out together.

Things went from Ronan blatantly asking, “The fuck is he here for?” to Ronan looking over Gansey’s shoulder and asking, “What, you left Parrish in the car?”

“Would you turn the music down?” Gansey called in exasperation over the truly punishing decibels of Ronan’s electronica. “Adam said he’d rather head home and study than listen to this.”

“Are you shitting me, he’s trying to _leave_ us? Parrish! Parrish, get your ass in here!”

“Do you think I should stop him?” Gansey asked, faintly bemused, as he and Noah watched Ronan surge out of the door and leap down the steps two and three at a time.

“I don’t think you can at this point.” Noah told Gansey mildly. “He went from being pissed that Adam’s here to being pissed that Adam’s not here.” He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “’s progress.”

Ronan was the one who instigated them hanging out together, just him and Adam. Mostly this meant driving up beside Adam when Adam was biking home from work and saying, “Get in, loser.”

“I’m not doing anything illegal with you.” Adam had told Ronan wryly, the first time.

“Wow, Parrish. I didn’t have anything in mind, but if you keep on with those kinds of expectations I _will_ rise to meet them. Now get in.”

Adam didn’t move right away.

“Better get in now while my plans for the night are just at ‘moderately unsafe’. Keep waiting around and those plans are gonna head toward ‘full-on felony’ real quick.”

Adam rolled his eyes but ultimately walked his bike toward the back of the BMW. “‘I guess that’s the best I can expect, coming from you.”

Ronan smirked. “That’s what I like to hear, Parrish.”

They hung out one-on-one fairly often after that. Noah was surprised it went so well. He half figured Adam was going to balk, eventually. When Ronan and Adam got scraped up tumbling off moving dollies. When Ronan talked Adam into using the bridge as a sort of diving board and the lake as a sort of suitable place to swim. When they went to the park to see just how fast the ancient rusted Roundabout could go, and a beat cop came along and told them, polite but not actually, that the sign said the park closed at dusk and they really ought to be on their way. Ronan had been about to throw some choice words in the cop’s face, but Adam laid on some of that southern charm he usually tried to hide away and assured the officer that he’d be “taking Ronan home, sir.” The cop had looked between them, slowly, and then he’d just given Adam a shrug that seemed to say, ‘on your own head be it.’ Ronan cackled for a solid fifteen minutes. 

As much trouble as Ronan was, and he was, Noah thought that Adam could tell that he could use at least a little bit of Ronan’s brand of wild exhilaration in his life. And Ronan, for all that he didn’t want to give anything away, spoke volumes in his actions when it came to Adam. Adam was clever, so he had to notice at least some of Ronan's less subtle gestures. 

Noah recalled feeling vaguely scandalized the first time Ronan let Adam drive the BMW. Ronan didn’t just let people _drive his BMW_. 

Even Adam seemed a little thrown off by the proposal. “You - are you sure?”

“You wanna stand around talking about it for another nine years, Parrish, or you wanna learn something?”

So Adam had taken the keys and gotten in the driver’s seat, leaving Gansey and Noah to shrug at each other, a _I-didn’t-know-they-were-there-yet-but-there-they-are_ sort of shrug.

After the awful night that left Adam hospitalized, Noah remembered Ronan, head down and teeth gritted in the Aglionby library. He spent hours unyieldingly reading line after line of text, with an utter misery so deep it could only be matched perhaps by a death row inmate who was to be his own attorney. Yet still. Line after line after line. How many motivating factors could there be for Ronan putting himself through it?

They kept getting closer after that. Ronan helping Adam move out, helping him find somewhere new, helping him move in. Ronan paying Adam’s rent, the pains he took to do it in the only way he could be sure Adam had to accept. Ronan spending more and more time at Adam’s apartment.

Noah had been a little worried, in those early phases, for Ronan. And not just because Adam had been dating Blue; Noah had never seen any longevity there, though he sympathized that it must have sucked for Ronan. It wasn’t like Noah had a problem with Adam. Adam was clever, with a quiet, sharp, covert sort of sense of humor and an acute willingness to go above and beyond, for his own goals and for the people he cared about. He’d been through terrible things and, as dark as he could have gone, he used it to motivate himself to be better. Noah was rooting for him. But in the earlier days, sometimes Adam seemed so far away, so far removed from the life around him, that Noah almost thought Adam might as well be a spirit himself. Noah didn’t always see how it would work, between Ronan and Adam.

But Noah had _felt_ Adam’s desperation flare through the ley line, when Adam had put so much of himself into repairing it so Ronan could use it to stand against Kavinsky’s dragon. Through all of Adam Parrish’s compartmentalization and prioritization, Ronan mattered to him in a way that Noah thought Adam had a hard time regarding square on. It started Noah thinking that Adam, a subtler creature, was probably exhibiting signs of his own that were less apparent to the untrained eye, and so he made an effort to look for those signs in less dire circumstances. 

Once Noah was looking, he could see that even though Adam was a hard one to read, there was a difference in Adam when Ronan was there - staying over Adam’s apartment, stopping by during Adam’s breaks at work, the rare days Ronan Lynch showed up for class - and when Ronan wasn’t there. If you knew to look, you could see it in Adam’s eyes and on his face. When Adam had come to expect Ronan to be there and Ronan wasn’t, it was a little like you were looking at Adam Parrish through the faintest hint of shadow. When Ronan was there, it was like looking at Adam Parrish with the vibrancy subtly enhanced.

Adam didn’t just allow Ronan to stay in his apartment because Ronan Lynch could be the unstoppable object and the immovable force both at once; Adam preferred Ronan there to being alone. And though no one would have guessed it from the way the pair of them started off, Adam was more comfortable with Ronan in his space than Gansey or Blue. When Ronan crashed on Adam’s floor, they found themselves willing to talk. Ronan told Adam a little about the music competitions he used to enter with his brothers. Matthew mostly got by with his adorable dimples and his adorable curls, but Ronan and Declan, they’d taken it seriously. That was the closest the brothers had been, when they’d practiced together using the fireplace as their stage. Adam told Ronan a little of how he used to lie awake some nights in the trailer, squeezing his eyes shut as tight as they’d go and vowing to himself over and over and over that at the very least, he’d survive longer than his father’s liver. They found a sort of understanding of each other, skirting past wounds. Talking about things they’d never ordinarily talk about if they both weren’t very tired and if it weren’t very dark and very warm in the very small space.

And from there, Noah started to believe that they really might have couple potential. 

They’d play each other at pool and their trash talk would get weirdly borderline flirty. They'd get so caught up that Blue would sometimes get exasperated with the pair of them and drag Gansey out for gelato (Noah went too, he loved the gelato place) and Ronan and Adam would sometimes not notice that the others had ever even left. 

Adam would fall asleep with his head on Ronan's shoulder while they all piled around Gansey’s laptop to rewatch the webisodes on Cole St. Clair. They watched them for Noah, Noah loved Cole St. Clair. He remembered liking NARKOTIKA. But more than that, he liked the idea of disappearing into the wild and ultimately, coming back out again, making a grand reappearance, putting a life back together in a way that was worth living. Noah loved a happy ending.

They’d watched all the episodes more times than any of them could count, but Noah didn’t think Adam had ever stayed awake till the end of the last episode, when the attractive blond scary one showed up and she and Cole kissed. Which was a shame for Adam; he was missing the best part.

But when they got to that last scene and Ronan scoffed, “that is so fake,” and Gansey protested that he’d done a little looking in to it (when his insomnia was especially bad didn’t need to be said) - apparently Cole St. Clair really _was_ dating the attractive blond scary one who apparently really did exist and apparently was a doctor - the fact that Adam had dozed through the large majority of it didn’t stop Adam from casually taking Ronan’s side and saying, “It was obviously scripted.”

“All evidence points to it being genuine; you two are just heartless.” Gansey decreed resignedly, and at that, Ronan and Adam exchanged mirroring grins.

Even their arguing seemed to feel more like listening to couples argue. It was sort of hard to pin down, that quality of hashing out the same old things and _knowing_ what the other person would say and things escalating to the point of sheer irrationality and both parties eventually tossing up their hands and finally getting to the point where they’ve mostly agreed to let things rest, until one snide comment starts things off all over again. Ronan and Adam could make a sport out of truly ridiculous arguments, and both were in it for the long haul. Once, they’d been arguing over something senseless that Noah didn’t think even Ronan or Adam really saw the point in, ultimately, but that didn’t mean either of them were going to stop, and Ronan had snarled, “Fuck you, Parrish,” and Adam, not even the slightest bit thrown off his stride, had shot back, “I’m not done talking, Lynch,” and Noah had clapped a hand over his own mouth and ghosted out of there before he got himself in trouble.

From there, it felt less like a matter of _if_ and more a matter of _when_. Noah was a deep believer of letting things run their own course, so he never said anything, but sometimes that was a real challenge. Especially the more obvious things became; like when Ronan gave Adam the mixed tape. _You know what that means, right?_ Noah had been badly tempted to ask Adam, but didn't. _I may have been dead a while but you kids still know what a mixed tape_ means _, right?_ He’d think at Adam, feeling just a little bit of that energy again, the energy he could vaguely remember his former-self having, still knowing better than to disrupt things.

When they finally got there on their own, when they finally kissed, Noah thought they deserved their privacy. It was enough to know that it happened.

Mostly he assured Aurora that Ronan had someone who understood him, that he wasn't alone, that he was taking hard-earned steps toward happiness.

Aurora was pleased and thankful to hear this, but it was obvious that just hearing the words wasn’t enough. Noah couldn’t fault her that.

So on a night when the ley line was at its strongest, Noah lent her every last hint of energy that he had to spare so she’d be just anchored enough to get to see her son. 

It was midnight, but Ronan and Adam and Opal were out among the trees playing hide-and-go-scare (because hide-and-go-seek was too ordinary, Noah could only assume) and it was only after Opal got in a particularly good leap from a high branch directly onto Adam, in a move that was sort of half tackle, half incredibly aggressive piggyback ride, that she allowed herself to be talked into the slightly more sedate activity of making s’mores. (Opal wasn’t especially interested in eating the s’mores, but marshmallows were one of her _favorite_ things to light on fire.)

As they walked back to the kitchen, Ronan and Adam’s fingers brushed a couple of times in a casual, almost-accidental sort of way, until Adam slipped his fingers between Ronan’s and they were well and truly hand-holding. Ronan pulled Adam into him and they kissed, once, twice, quick easygoing sort of kisses that came when you got to do it all the time. They kept walking.

Later, when Ronan, Adam, and Opal fell asleep in a pile on the couch, Aurora turned to Noah with grateful far-off eyes and said, “I wish I could tell Niall,” and then she faded gently into the summer night.

And Noah knew, without quite having the capacity to explain, that it was for the last time.

And he knew that he himself was only clinging to the living world by the thinnest shadows of thread, and so he’d have no choice but to follow, soon.

Soon. Soon.

But he’d seen and re-lived and missed so many things. He deserved to be there for this, for at least a little more of the happily ever after.

He held on.


End file.
